Last night proved to me that this game is still in Beta. It is an expansion, so its pretty polished, however some things are obvious they need adjusting. There are some major balancing issues that need to be worked out, and also a lot of quests that the description needs tweaking as they are really unclear. Some class skills are severely broken, Paladins especially.

But thats why we are all here right?

I for one am really glad that Blizzard has proper beta tests. There are a lot of companies out there that would have launched at this point, which is too early. I’ve seen an increasing number of MMOs release before they are ready, and they suffer immensely because of it.

A great change is the use of the mind control style controls when you are interacting with a fixed catapult, for example. Bombing runs are the same thing, you get the mind control bar. The old way of doing things was you had an item in your inventory that you had to use to drop a bomb. This makes it much easier to just pickup and start the bomb dropping instead of searching for an item in your bags.

The Death Knight is a little hard to get used to the combat mechanics for me. Its so unique compared to the other classes. Also I don’t quite understand the talent tree synergy yet. That of course will come with time.

All and all I am enjoying myself, and thats the point of a game right? :)

SPOILER ALERT

If you care about doing the quests yourself for the first time, do not read on.

One of the most interesting things I have ever seen in WoW so far happened when I was questing. First off the area is instanced somehow. I don’t exactly know how they are doing it, but I am sure going to test it out. As you completed quests, you would go back and forth into Acherus. As you progressed through the quest chains Ebon Hold would significantly change. It starts out being covered by Scarlet Crusade presence, and when you leave Ebon Hold for good, that presence is basically non-existent. This really gives you a feeling of going through the story line as things progress.

The last quest involves going to Lights Hope, where you are involved in a big battle. It finally results in an amazing dialog if you are into lore. After the dialog completes and you complete the quest, you are transported to the current timeline. This use of game mechanics is truly amazing. You really feel like you are involved in the story.

While I was questing I couldn’t help but feel the overuse of these bombing run quetsts. There was two quests, Massacre At Light’s Point and An End To All Things…. The 2nd being time consuming and retarded if you ask me. The first being not much better, however quicker. The mechanics of both were to be frank … boring.

I’m out of the starting area now and I’m not sure which zone I want to level to 58 in (I’m part way through 57).

I just got a beta key to the WotLK Beta yesterday. Some friends and I did the first instance in one of the starting areas Utgarde Keep. This instance felt like it was tuned for level 68 characters in mainly blues. Our group was made up of a Druid (Tank), Mage, Hunter, Warlock, and Me on my Holy Paladin.

I healed most of the instance only using Holy Shock. Holy Shock is now effected by a talent called Infusion of Light, this talent makes it so every time you crit using Holy Shock, your next Holy Light is instant. So between Holy Shock and the occasional Holy Light, I could handle this instance in my sleep. However I am probably pretty over geared for this instance.

After we were done, my friends went off to bed. I stayed up and tried my hand at some soloing. They have significantly changed the way that judgements work. You now have three judgements, Judgement of Justice, Judgement of Light, and Judgement of Wisdom. Think of them like a combination of the old Judgement spell and the old effects caused when you judge Seal of Wisdom, Seal of Justice or Seal of Light.

So now what you can do is cast Seal of Righteousness on yourself and then use Judgement of Light. The mob will receive both the extra damage from Judging Righteousness and the Judgement of Light debuff. No more do you need to cast Seal of Light to get the Judgement debuff on the mob. This adds a lot of interesting combinations you can do with your skills, and makes the Seal system much easier to use with much less button mashing.

I did find one bug in my travels. I cast Seal of Righteousness on myself, attacked a mob, cast Judgement of Justice and then kept auto attacking. This is what ended up happening. Every auto attack after I judged Justice cause 800 points of damage. I am sure this is a bug.

The plan tonight is to possibly try The Nexus on the other side of Northrend. If that fails, I’m going to try my hand at some quests near and around Utgarde.

I’ve added video support to my photo gallery. It now is a media gallery instead. And with that, it has a new URL. Please go to my Media Gallery

Some fun stuff with this latest version. I’ve added backgroundrb support which processes the videos and the images after you upload them. No more waiting for the upload to complete. Once the file hits the server, you can go and play, do something else, meanwhile the file is processed and added to the site.

Next up, multiple file uploads?

This is a project I have been working on for a while in my private SVN repo, its currently running in #wowhead on freenode.net. Its been running for about 10 months or so now.

You can view the code changes here: http://fish.tecnobrat.com/browse/RubyIRCBot

I will be making my SVN public shortly.

Edit: SVN is up – http://svn.tecnobrat.com/repos/rubybot/trunk/